The book

Beguiled by the figure of German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who disrupted the assumptions of quantum mechanics with his notorious Uncertainty Principle, earning him the Nobel Prize in physics in 1932, a young, disenchanted philosopher attempts to right his own intellectual and emotional course and take the measure of the evil at work in the contemporary world.

In this critically acclaimed novel, Jérôme Ferrari takes stock of European culture's failings during the 20th century and inserts their implications into a compelling vision of the contemporary world. His story is one of eternal returns, of a perpetual fall of Icarus—the inevitably compromised meeting between a man's soul and the mysterious beauty of the world.

The author

Jérôme Ferrari
Jérôme Ferrari is a writer and translator born in 1968 in Paris. His 2012 novel, The Sermon on the Fall of Rome, won the Goncourt Prize. He is also the author of Where I Left My Soul (MacLehose, 2012). He teaches philosophy at the French School of Abu Dhabi.